had seemed ordinary enough on the outside. But she didn't hate Grimes on sight, as she'd thought she would.
He said, 'I think I'm the luckiest man in the world. Edna may have told you, ma'am, I lost my wife to the influenza. I never thought I'd fall in love with another woman again till I met your daughter. She showed me I was wrong, and I'm ever so glad she did.'
Edna looked as if she would have lain down on the floor for him then and there if Nellie hadn't been in the coffeehouse. Nellie did her best to hide her disgust. Grimes had asked Edna to marry him. He hadn't got her in a family way, either, as Edna's father had before he married Nellie.
'Where are your people from, Mr. Grimes?' Nellie asked. 'What do they do?'
'I was born in New Rumley, Ohio, Mrs. Jacobs,' Grimes answered, 'the same town that saw the birth of the great General Custer. My father runs the weekly newspaper there: the New Rumley Courier. His father ran it before him; I reckon my brother Caleb'11 take it on when the time comes.'
'Why aren't you still back there yourself?' What Nellie meant was, If you were still back there, you wouldn 't be rumpling my daughter's clothes.
Merle Grimes could hardly have missed that, but it didn't faze him. He said, 'I wanted steady work. The newspaper business is a lot of things, but it's not steady. You go to work for the U.S. government, you know you've got a paycheck for the rest of your days. I won't get rich, but I won't go hungry, either.'
Nellie didn't know what sort of answer she'd thought she would get, but that wasn't it. 'You seem a steady enough young fellow,' she said, an admission she hadn't looked to make.
'I try to be,' Grimes said-steadily.
'Isn't he the bulliest thing in the whole wide world, Ma?' Edna said.
She was thinking with her cunt, a phrase that hadn't come to Nellie's mind since her days in the demimonde. But Merle Grimes did look to be a much better bargain than Nellie had expected. 'He may do,' she said. 'He just may do.'
Engine roaring, the barrel bounded across the Kansas prairie north of Fort Leavenworth. Colonel Irving Morrell stood head and shoulders out of the turret, so he could take in as much of the battlefield as possible. The test model easily outran and out-maneuvered the Great War machines against which it was pitted.
Morrell ducked down into the turret and bawled a command to the driver in the forward compartment: 'Halt!' And the driver halted, and it was not divine intervention. With the engine separated from the barrel's crew by a steel bulkhead, a man could hear a shouted order. In a Great War barrel, one man could not hear another who was screaming into his ear.
At Morrell's order, the gunner traversed the turret till the cannon bore on the barrel he had chosen. The old- style machines were trying to bring their guns to bear on him, too, but they had to point themselves in the right direction, a far slower and clumsier process than turning the turret.
'Fire!' Morrell yelled. The turret-mounted cannon roared. A shell casing leaped from the breech as flame spurted from the muzzle. It was only a training round, with no projectile, but it made almost as much noise as the real thing, and getting used to the hellish racket of the battlefield was not the least important part of training. The loader passed a new shell to the gunner, who slammed it home.
An umpire raised a red flag and ordered the barrel at which Morrell had fired out of the exercise. Morrell laughed. This was the fifth or sixth lumbering brute to which he'd put paid this afternoon. The Great War barrels hadn't come close to hurting him. Had it been a prizefight, the referee would have stopped it.
But, in the ring or on the battlefield, he who stood still asked to get tagged. Morrell ducked down again and shouted, 'Go! Go hard! Let's see how many of them we can wreck before they make us call it a day.'
He laughed. This was as close to real combat as he could come. He might have enjoyed going up to Canada with a few companies of barrels, but he knew General Custer didn't really need his services. The Canucks had been pretty quiet lately. The Confederate States were still licking their wounds, too. So he would pretend, as he'd pretended before the Great War, and have a dandy time doing it, too.
The barrel up ahead had the name PEACHES painted on its armored flanks. That made Morrell laugh, too. Since the earliest days of barrels, men had named them for girlfriends and wives and other pretty women. Peaches belonged to Lieutenant Jenkins; Morrell could see him standing up in the cupola. He saw Morrell, too, and sent him a gesture no junior officer should ever have aimed at his superior. Morrell laughed again.
Jenkins tried to keep him off by opening up with his rear and starboard machine guns. They fired blanks, too. Not only was that cheaper, but live ammunition would have torn through the thin steel of the test model's superstructure. This time, Morrell's chuckle had a predatory ring. It wouldn't do Jenkins any good. This machine was assumed to be armored against such nuisances.
But an umpire raised a flag and pointed at Morrell. Morrell started to shout a hot protest-sometimes the umpires forgot they were supposed to pretend his barrel was properly armored. But then he realized the officer was pointing not at the barrel but at himself. He could not argue about that. His own body was vulnerable to machine- gun fire, even if that of the barrel was supposed not to be.
It was, in fact, a nice test of his crew. He bent down into the turret one last time. 'I'm dead,' he said. 'You're on your own. I'll try not to bleed on you.' He started to tell them to nail Jen-kins' barrel, but decided he'd used up enough 'dying' words already.
The men made him proud. His gunner, a broad-shouldered sergeant named Michael Pound, said, 'If you're dead, sir, get the hell out of the way so I can see what I'm doing.' As soon as Morrell moved, Pound peered out of the turret and then started giving orders with authority a general might have envied. They were good orders, too, sensible orders. Maybe he couldn't have commanded an entire brigade of barrels, but he sounded as if he could.
And he went straight after the barrel that had 'killed' his commander. Morrell knew he couldn't have done a better job himself. In short order, Pound shelled Jenkins' machine from the side: fire to which its main armament could not respond. An umpire soon had to raise a flag signaling the Great War barrel destroyed.
'Bully!' Morrell shouted, and smacked Pound on his broad back. 'How did you learn to command so well?'
'Sir, I've been listening to you all along,' his gunner answered, 'and keeping an eye on you, too. I copied what you'd do and what you'd say.'
'At least you didn't copy my accent,' Morrell said. Pound laughed. His voice had a northern twang to it that made him sound almost like a Canadian. Morrell went on, 'It's still your barrel, Sergeant. What are you going to do next?'
Sergeant Pound went barrel hunting as ferociously as Morrell could have wanted. When the umpires finally whistled the exercise to a halt, one of them approached the test model. 'Colonel, you were supposed to have been killed,' he said in the fussily precise tones that failed to endear umpires to ordinary soldiers.
'Captain, on my word of honor, I did and said nothing at all to fight this barrel after your colleague signaled that I'd been hit,' Morrell answered. He climbed out onto the top of the turret, then called down into it: 'Sergeant Pound, stand up and take a bow.' Pound did stand up. When he saw the captain with the umpire's armband, he came to attention and saluted.
As if doing him a favor he didn't deserve, the captain returned the salute. Then he gave Morrell a fishy stare. 'I have a great deal of trouble believing what you just told me, Colonel,' he said.
That was the wrong tack to take. 'Captain, if you are suggesting that I would lie to you on my word of honor, I have a suggestion for you in return,' Morrell said quietly. 'If you like, we can meet in some private place and discuss the matter man to man. I am, I assure you, at your service.'
U.S. Army officers hadn't dueled since before the War of Secession. Morrell didn't really have pistols at sunrise in mind. But he would have taken a good deal of pleasure in whaling the stuffing out of the officious captain. He let that show, too. As he'd expected, the captain wilted. 'Sir, I think you may have misunderstood me,' he said, looking as if he wished he could sink into the churned-up prairie.
'I hope I did,' Morrell said. 'I also hope Sergeant Pound's outstanding achievement will be prominently featured in your reports of the action. He deserves that, and I want to see him get it.'
'He shall have it,' the umpire said. 'You may examine the report as closely as you like.' He wasn't altogether a fool, not if he realized Morrell would be reading that report to make sure he kept his promise. He still came too close to being a perfect fool to make Morrell happy.
Pound said, 'Thank you very much, sir,' as Morrell climbed down into the turret once more.
'Don't thank me,' Morrell said. 'You're the one who earned it. And now, let's take this beast back to the barn.
